Hi everyone!

I'm working for a French Canadian newspaper and we are planning to change platform for our website from Wordpress to Joomla. We have a functionality with our Wordpress website that enables us to import articles each weeks from our production software (Milenium Designer) that produces a batch of XML files and I was wondering if there is an existing K2 extention that can do that or if it's possible to have someone craft us one?

Basically, Milenium collects the articles information (Article title, lead (intro paragraph in bold characters), article's author, article's text, pictures, pictures legends, photo credit, etc.), creates the xml files, put them in ZIP achives and sends them by FTP in a folder of our website installation.

So, to help you see how it presently works on our Wordpress website (soon to bi switched to Joomla), I’ve attached a copy the two ZIP archives containing the XMLs and images that our production software generates and sends to a folder on the website’s server through FTP.

First archive (MWEB_729_xml.ZIP) contains an XML with the list of the articles with their ID numbers ( www.dropbox.com/s/x27dbplpjvd32mc/MWEB_729_xml.ZIP?dl=0 ), and the second one (Items_.ZIP) contains the XMLs of separate articles and the Data folder containing the pictures associated with them ( www.dropbox.com/s/8u87suhy1fs7i89/Items_.ZIP?dl=0 ).

Bellow, I will show you a couple of visual details of how it is set up on the current Wordpress website.

1. You have the import component’s display on the website :
   
   
   


2. You press the top blue button to verify the presence of the ZIP archives on the server. When they’re detected, the plugin opens them and the button changes to a “ready” state for us to click and start the import process.
   
   
   


3. Once completed, you have the log displaying all the import’s details like success and errors.
   
   
   


4. For the article’s main picture (if one present), we have a module on the side in the article edition that allows us to edit or delete the said picture, or manually add one if none present.
   
   
   


5. Here is an example of the fields we have when we edit the picture :
   
   
   


6. And here is an example of how the articles are displayed on the website’s front end.
   
   
   


7. And finally, when the importer detects that an article has more than one pictures, it grabs the first one to but it as “Article’s main picture”, and automatically creates a little photo gallery at the bottom of the article with the other pictures and their legends.
   
   
   

So that’s about it for what we need... if something already exists that does that, please point me in the right direction and if it doesn't but some developers would be able to "craft" this for us, we would like to have an estimate of the cost and time for a project like this. If so, maybe we could communicate in private for this?

Thanks in advance for the help and I will be waiting for your answer on that.

Best regards,
Denis Langevin.

Hello Denis,

Best of luck with your project.
There are several import extensions like K2 Import and a service called CMS2CMS which supports both Joomla!/K2 and Wordpress.

I think you'd better address this issue to them.

Hi Krikor,

Thanks for your reply...

For a little precision on our project request, we're presently on Wordpress and will be soon moving to Joomla. Sure, we probably have to find a way to migrate the Wordpress articles to Joomla but the function I asked for in my first post is not quite that. What we need is the ability to import articles and pictures from XML files produced by our newspaper production software (Milenium Designer) and sent on the website's server through FTP.

From what I've seen of your suggestions, K2 Import only seems to work with CSV files and CMS2CMS would not work for our project... would rather need a XML2CMS extention type! :)

Still open for suggestions. :)

You can contact the folks at K2 Import for any assistance or a custom build of their extension.
I would personally recommend a custom SQL script by a db expert fitted to your needs.